How To Meet Your Employees' Personal Needs

Creating a positive workplace culture that successfully attracts and retains talented people will not happen by chance. The best employers truly believe that employees ARE their number one asset – without exception. Local workers choose to work there over other options.

How do you know if you are an employer of choice? Your employees tell you through their loyalty, high retention rates, and especially when they encourage others to work for your company. One best practice for becoming an employer of choice is to focus on your employees' personal needs.

There are two essential types of employee needs and these aren’t mutually exclusive:

1. Personal needs – the human aspect that people bring to their work and to an interaction
2. Practical needs – objectives accomplished through an interaction

Here are five key principles to meeting your employees’ personal needs, according to Development Dimensions International:

1. Esteem: Focusing on facts, respect and support will help employees with their sense of self-worth, enabling them to be motivated, confident, innovative and committed to their work.
2. Empathy: Acknowledging people’s feelings of success, failure, pride and frustration defuses negative emotions and encourages positive emotions.
3. Involve: Show you value your people by asking for their input. Greater commitment and success is likely when ideas belong to the people who carry them out.
4. Share: People work best with leaders they trust. Leaders should appropriately disclose thoughts, feelings or rationales.
5. Support: Providing coaching, training, guidance and mentoring builds people’s sense of ownership and confidence.

Source: Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) NIST

Want to learn more about successfully attracting employees?

Contact Purdue MEP at mepsupport@purdue.edu.